New Kensington Ten Commandments Monument Update

Just as there's a Facebook page supporting the (still unconstitutional) Ten Commandments monument in Connellsville, there's now a Facebook page calling for the removal of the (equally unconstitutional) Ten Commandments monument in New Kensington.

From the description:

This purpose of this group is to show support and solidarity for plaintiffs in Freedom From Religion Foundation v. New Kensington-Arnold School District, a federal lawsuit currently before the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Plaintiffs object to a stone monument depicting the 10 Commandments prominently displayed in front of Valley High School, a public school in New Kensington, Pennsylvania.

Such displays show overt favoritism for Christianity on behalf of the government and violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment as applied to the states via the 14th Amendment, as found by the United States Supreme Court in Stone v. Graham.

Anyone know if there's a similar facebook page for the monument in Connellsville?

A Warm Tribune-Review Sendoff

Where Eric Heyl offers a nice moist towel (metaphorical, of course) to Ed Feulner, Trib columnist and current President of the Heritage Foundation.

For those not familiar with this story, here's some background.  Earlier this month the Tribune-Review reported that South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint would be resigning from the Senate to replace Feulner as President of the Heritage Foundation.  According to this piece from Newsmax, this makes for one big happy:

Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner is enthusiastically welcoming the appointment of South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint as his replacement.

In announcing that DeMint will step down from the Senate on Dec. 31 to take over the running of the foundation, Feulner issued the following statement.

“Three years ago, I told the Heritage Foundation's Board of Trustees that I would step down as president in April of 2013. I urged them to set up a formal succession process and begin a national search.

“During their nationwide search, the Board looked for a successor who would keep Heritage on its course of growth and innovation, and preserve our widely acknowledged status as an institutional center of the conservative movement. And the Board has found a splendid successor.

“I'm delighted to announce that the Board has elected Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina to take over next April as President of The Heritage Foundation.

Do I need to add that Tribune-Review owner Richard Mellon Scaife is the Vice-President of the Board of Trustees for Heritage and also owns 40% of Newsmax?

Nice tight little web of journalismness there, huh?  All those connections to Scaife.  No mention of them in Scaife's paper...

Anyway, I wanted to point out a few things.  I think we can gather where Heyl did his research for his first question:

Q: You shepherded The Heritage Foundation from a nine-member outfit to an organization that employees 275-plus and occupies three Washington, D.C., buildings. Were you confident setting out that you could grow the foundation into what The New York Times once called “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis”?

If you go to Ed Feulner's bio at Heritage, you'll see these two paragraphs at the top:

Edwin J. Feulner’s leadership as President of The Heritage Foundation has transformed the think tank from a small policy shop into America’s powerhouse of conservative ideas and what the New York Times calls “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.”

Under Feulner, Heritage’s presence in Washington grew from a nine-member staff working out of a rented office on Capitol Hill in 1977 to a 275-person organization occupying three office buildings near the U.S. Capitol today.

Eric, that's some great in-depth research, my friend!  Must've taken you all of 6 seconds to find.  In touting Heritage, Feulner points out how it became such a powerhouse; credibility, marketing and timeliness.

On its credibility, he responds with this on pointing out some of Heritage's significant achievements:

It‘s been 35 years so I could go through a long, long list. But in the ’80s, it has to be when Ronald Reagan (backed) the anti-missile defense system, or Star Wars, as it was then called, and (the ideas) that tax reform and tax cuts lead to a growing economy.

Hmm...so the great achievements are SDI and Trickle-down Economics - but was any of it true?

Well we have the American Physical Society way back in 1987 already doubting the feasibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative and we all know how well Trickle-down works:

The tax cuts came in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. The administration's plan slashed corporate and individual income tax rates, with the biggest cut in the top rate. The Reagan team promised that their tax cuts would jolt the economy back to life because, as the Wall Street Journal's editors put it, "high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive." And the true believers went so far as to suggest that the economy would grow fast enough that tax revenues would actually rise, making the tax cuts painless.

The results never came close to measuring up to the supply-side rhetoric. For starters, the tax cuts busted the federal budget. The federal deficit ballooned from 2.7% of GDP in 1980 to 6% of GDP in 1983, the largest peacetime deficit in history, and was still 5% of GDP in 1986. Tax revenues did pick up, especially after the 1983 payroll tax increase kicked in, reducing the deficit somewhat. Still, tax revenues grew far more slowly over than the 1980s business cycle (2.5% from 1979 to 1989) than they did in the 1990s business cycle (4.1% from 1989 to 2000).

Yea, great achievements, there Ed.

One bit of early Heritage history not brought up much these days (and a h/t to an astute reader for bringing this to my attention): Roger Pearson.  From the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism at Ferris State University:

Fascist ideologist Roger Pearson, a Pioneer Fund beneficiary ($568,000 from 1981-1991) and author of Eugenics and Race, published by Willis Carto's notoriously anti-Semitic Noontide Press, argues that the white race is endangered by inferior genetic stock, but with proper use of modern biological technology "a new super-generation" descended from "only the fittest" of the previous generation can be produced. The first nation to adopt such a scientific breeding program, Pearson contends, "would dominate the rest of the world."

In 1965 Pearson became editor of Western Destiny, a magazine established by Carto and dedicated to spreading fascist ideology. Using the pseudonym [link to deposition] of Stephan Langton, Pearson then became the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966-67 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question," which included articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power," and "Swindlers of the Crematoria."

Despite Pearson's long history of association with neo-Nazi groups, he was appointed in 1977 to the original board of editors of Policy Review, a journal published by the respected Heritage Foundation, a conservative political research organization in Washington, D.C. [Emphasis added.]

After an expose in the Washington Post in May, 1977, Pearson was asked to leave Heritage.  Feulner became President of Heritage in 1977 - would've been nice to see a comment on how/why Heritage fired the   fascist (maybe even why they hired him in the first place), huh?

More Climate Blah-Blah

Yesterday, Mediamatters named Marc Morano the Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year saying among other things that:

These days Morano is paid by an industry-funded group to run the climate denial website ClimateDepot.com. At Climate Depot, Morano serves as the de facto research department for the right-wing media's attacks on climate science, and mobilizes his readers to target individual scientists and reporters for telling the public about climate change threats. The site was instrumental in manufacturing the 2009 "Climategate" controversy, which Morano incorrectly claimed exposed "deliberate manipulation of facts and data" by climate scientists. Morano is a darling of the organization most committed to climate denial, the Heartland Institute.

The "industry-funded" group mentioned above is called the "Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow" (CFACT) and Sourcewatch has this oh-so surprising bit of info on CFACT:

Media Transparency calculates that between 1991 and 2006 CFACT gained $1,280,000 from 18 grants from only two foundations -- the Carthage Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

Actually, according to the Bridgeproject.com, those two foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife have given an even $2,000,000 to CFACT between 1996 and 2009 ($2.433 million if you adjust for inflation).

Which made me curious to see if Mr Morano actually made it onto Mr Scaife's pages and whether any mention is made of CFACT's financial connections to the Trib's owner.

Of course he made it into the Trib and of course there's no mention of the money (there never is)

Take a look at this from this past August where Eric Heyl (Hey Eric, how's it going?) tosses out the first softball:

Marc Morano operates Climatedepot.com, an Internet clearinghouse for information on climate, environmental and energy news. Morano, a former aide to U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., spoke to the Trib on the latest developments in the climate-change debate.

Q: It‘s the hottest year on record so far in the Northeast. Must be global warming, right?

A: Globally, it‘s not the hottest. In fact, here is the problem: The heat they are touting as proof of man-made global warming is occurring in the continental United States, which is less than 2 percent of the Earth‘s surface. So far in 2012, (global) temperatures have been slightly below the average for the last 15 years. So if the Earth isn‘t actually in record warmth globally, why are we looking at 2 percent (of its surface) and then trying to draw extrapolations?

Let's stop right there. They're speaking in early August, 2012 so we can safely assume that the data Morano's commenting on is from the previous month.  So let's have a look at the data.  Heyl was probably responding to this (or something like it):

Aug. 6, 2012 — If you live in the Northeast, welcome to the hottest year on record. New data released by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University shows the Northeast's seven-month average (January through July) of 49.9 degrees was the warmest such period since 1895, the year such record keeping began. It was the second warmest such period in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the warmest first seven months of the year in the rest of the Northeast.

But look at what Morano did.  He sidesteps the data by saying that the Continental US is only 2% of the planet's surface and so it's an extrapolation to make any generalizations about the whole from such a small sliver.  Fair enough  but then he says that 2012 is slightly cooler than the average of the past 15 years.

He's what you call "cherry picking" the data.  By limiting his scope to the last decade and a half, he's able to make a more or less useless extrapolation himself.  In fact, according to NOAA:

The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2012 was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F). This is the fourth warmest July since records began in 1880.

Who's cherry picking the data?  Amazing how much anti-science you can buy for $2.4 million, huh?

Meanwhile, Outside...

From the most recent NOAA "State of the Climate" report:

The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for November 2012 was 0.67°C (1.21°F) above the 20th century average of 12.9°C (60.4°F). This is the fifth warmest November since records began in 1880. Including this November, the 10 warmest Novembers have occurred in the past 12 years.

And:

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January–November 2012 was the eighth warmest such period on record, at 0.59°C (1.06°F) above the 20th century average.

Something to think about the next time a climate denier tells you that global warming "stopped in 1998."

Since It's Christmas Eve...

And so, for my Christian friends (even though this music was composed for Eastertime):










Merry Christmas, my friends.

Jack Kelly Sunday

In a column about a particular stream of liberal racism, Jack Kelly (conservative columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) ended things with these three paragraphs:

What does it say about liberals that so many think only losers and whiners can be authentically black?

To demand people think or act a certain way because of the color of their skin is the essence of racism. That's why Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when his children would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

But then, according to his niece, MLK was a Republican.

It's Sunday and I am in a particular antsy fact-checking mood.  So let me start with that last sentence and ask, is that true?

While it's certainly true that Dr. King's niece said that, a responsible columnist (or at the very least a responsible newspaper employing that columnist) would verify whether what Dr. King's niece said was actually true.  If it isn't, then passing along her falsehood conflicts with the mission of any newspaper: to inform the public.

Turns out what she said isn't true.

Politifact checked this story out 11 months ago and found it to be "false."  Part of their evidence goes back even further:

However, in a 2008 Associated Press story, King’s son and namesake Martin Luther King III said:"It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states."

Then there's the letter of 1 October 1956 to Viva Sloan who asked him about the Eisenhower-Stevensen presidential race of that year. In the letter he wrote:

In the past I have always voted the Democratic ticket.

But that was 1956. What about the next election, in 1960?  In the book, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, there's this passage:

I was grateful to Senator Kennedy for the genuine concern he expressed in my arrest. After the call I made a statement to the press thanking him but not endorsing him. Very frankly, I did not feel at that time that there was much difference between Kennedy and Nixon. I could find some things in the background of both men that I didn't particularly agree with. Remembering what Nixon had done out in California to Helen Gahegen Douglas, I felt that he was an opportunist at many times who had no real grounding in basic convictions, and his voting record was not good. He improved when he became vice president, but, when he was a congressman and a senator, he didn't have a good voting record.

With Mr. Kennedy, after I looked over his voting record, I felt at points that he was so concerned about being president of the United States that he would compromise basic principles to become president. But I had to look at something else beyond the man-the people who surrounded him-and I felt that Kennedy was surrounded by better people. It was on that basis that I felt that Kennedy would make the best president.

I never came out with an endorsement. My father did, but I never made one. I took this position in order to maintain a nonpartisan posture, which I have followed all along in order to be able to look objectively at both parties at all times. As I said to him all along, I couldn't, and I never changed that even after he made the call during my arrest. I made a statement of thanks, and I expressed my gratitude for the call, but in the statement I made it clear that I did not endorse any candidate and that this was not to be interpreted as an endorsement.

I had to conclude that the then known facts about Kennedy were not adequate to make an unqualified judgment in his favor. I do feel that, as any man, he grew a great deal. After he became president I thought we really saw two Kennedys-a Kennedy the first two years and another Kennedy emerging in 1963. He was getting ready to throw off political considerations and see the real moral issues. Had President Kennedy lived, I would probably have endorsed him in 1964. But, back at that time, I concluded that there was something to be desired in both candidates. [Emphases added.]

Yea, Dr. King was a Republican.  Sure he was.  Perhaps in the alternate reality of right wing politics, but not in, you know, actual reality.

At best, Jack Kelly's guilty of a lie of omission (he knew that what Dr. King's niece said was inaccurate but went with it anyway, hiding behind some "according to..." weasel words) or simple bad reporting (he didn't bother to check the "fact" because it fit his story).  It's always the same question: Which is it, Jack?  Are you dishonest or incompetent?

On the other hand, the P-G should never have let this one off Jack's desk.  While I feel bad for whomever is entrusted with the impossible task of fact-checking Jack, sometimes the misinformation is just too much to allow.

CIA Confirms...

Hey remember this?

It was (partially) about how the new movie "Zero Dark Thirty" purported to show how the torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden and how it was all BS.

And now the CIA's confirmed it.

From the CIA's website:

Second, the film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin. That impression is false. As we have said before, the truth is that multiple streams of intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was hiding in Abbottabad. Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well. And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved. [Emphasis added.]

And, of course, torture's illegal - whether it works or not (which it doesn't).